Electronic messaging has been widely adopted for business-related communications. Electronic messaging technologies such as e-mail and instant messaging can enable an organization to operate globally, while remaining cohesive and coordinated. In the context of a large organization, internal electronic messaging can be a powerful tool for the rapid exchange of information among many employees and can help employees identify and access each other's expertise as well as other sources of information.
Typically, however, as the size of an organization grows, so does the complexity of the business relationships within and external to the organization. Employees' expertise, collaborations, business and research projects, and various other business functions are often constantly evolving. Consequently, electronic communications within an organization that pertain to particular subject matter may not be consistently directed to the appropriate recipients, which can result in wasted time and resources.
One such scenario involves an individual who begins work in a new job function. Colleagues may continue to send the individual messages pertaining to his or her prior job function, leaving the individual to inform them of his or her new job function and perhaps suggest an appropriate recipient of the messages or an alternative resource for the information sought. This exchange can place a considerable burden on the individual, especially if multiple colleagues make the same mistake. These miscommunications can also delay access to the appropriate individual or information originally sought.
Existing approaches to this and similar problems focus primarily on routing or rerouting an electronic message to an appropriate recipient. For example, a messaging system may correlate previously sent messages with their recipients to create delivery rules for future messages containing similar content, or a messaging system may automatically route a message to a particular recipient based on the recipient's expertise in the subject matter of the message. Such approaches may help avoid delivering messages to inappropriate recipients, but they are not well-suited for informing a message-sender of the recipients' preferences or suggestions, and they may still be subject to inaccuracies inherent in the systems' determinations of which individuals should receive the message. Further, when messaging systems route or reroute an electronic message after it has been transmitted by the message-sender, the message-sender may lose the ability to modify the message, learn that the original addressee is not the appropriate contact, choose an alternative addressee, or otherwise reconsider how to approach the issue at hand.
An efficient way to provide customizable information to a message-sender related to the content and addressees of an electronic message, prior to transmission of the message to any addressees, would be useful.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.